Stendhal Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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Wit lasts no more than two centuries.

Stendhal
What is really beautiful must always be true.

Stendhal
Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

Stendhal
The only excuse for God is that He does not exist.

Stendhal
Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

Stendhal
One can acquire everything in solitude — except character.

Stendhal
I know of only one rule: style cannot be too clear, too simple.

Stendhal
The only passion that has outlived all the rest is love of money.

Stendhal
It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.

Stendhal
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.

Stendhal
Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words.

Stendhal
Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.

Stendhal
It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation.

Stendhal
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.

Stendhal
If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.

Stendhal
A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.

Stendhal
After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.

Stendhal
A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth!

Stendhal
A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

Stendhal
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.

Stendhal
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.

Stendhal
This mania of the mothers of the period, to be constantly in pursuit of a son-in-law.

Stendhal
I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.

Stendhal
A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.

Stendhal
Woman is a delightful musical instrument, of which love is the bow, and man the artist.

Stendhal
Love has always been the most important business in my life; I should say the only one.

Stendhal
She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?

Stendhal
Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?

Stendhal
One of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.

Stendhal
When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.

Stendhal